Gay vote as illusion: What does it mean?

Patrick Moore. Patrick Moore is the author of "Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay SexualityCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Does the gay vote exist?

As the gay community becomes increasingly assimilated into the general population, one might expect its vote to become more evenly divided between political parties. However, since the Voter News Service began polling for sexual identity in 1992, the overwhelming majority of self-identified gay voters have remained Democratic.

This held true through the last presidential election in 2000, when 70 percent of 4 million self-identified gay voters selected Al Gore, 25 percent voted for George Bush and the rest cast ballots for Ralph Nader.

In 1996, historian John D'Emilio estimated the gay vote at 3 percent of the general population and characterized it as young and growing. By 2002, a national survey commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign estimated that 5 percent of U.S. voters were gay. (This doesn't include the huge number of gay people still leading closeted lives.)

But, despite a presidential election in which the race is likely to be decided by a few percentage points, gay voters are not being courted. With gay marriage an incendiary issue, moderates like Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry still see active, visible support of gay issues as unacceptably dangerous.

Gay voters are among those who will vote for Kerry this year not because he inspires us but because of Kerry's position as an electable "anybody but Bush" candidate.

But what will we get in exchange?

Although Kerry holds a strong voting record on gay issues, he is squarely against gay marriage. Kerry's position is puzzling: he takes pride in having voted against the federal Defense of Marriage Act a few years ago but, in February, supported an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution banning gay marriage.

Though there is little to complain about in his record on AIDS and much to admire in his support of HIV vaccine research, Kerry has not moved to counter the Bush administration's recent AIDS pledges with specific proposals of his own.

Kerry is supportive of gay issues but appears to have made a calculated decision that moderate swing voters are more important than the nearly 3 million gay votes Gore received in the last election. Because of the dismal options they face, it is assumed that gay voters will follow Kerry even if he abandons their most popular cause. It is as if Bush announced his support for late-term abortion while trying to reassure Christian Conservatives that he supported their agenda.

It is a mark of desperation that gay voters have decided to accept such an insult.

Kerry reminds me of another well-meaning figure from the recent past: former President Bill Clinton.

While Clinton is a brilliant and inspiring man who personally supports gay people, his presidency was a disaster on every issue of importance to the gay community. From "don't ask, don't tell" to the Defense of Marriage Act, Clinton's legacy is hardly one to arouse allegiance to the Democratic Party. Even his postpresidential work on AIDS has been entirely focused on Africa, where the crisis is safely heterosexual.

Yet, what is the alternative? Even the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization of gays, is torn about supporting Bush for re-election, and for good reason. Republican strategists are trying to use gay marriage as a rallying point for Bush's white evangelical base and to expand that base into minority communities through the network of churches that are the center of black and Latino life in America.

Perhaps the only bright spots in Bush's record on gay issues have been his periodic promises to develop a worldwide strategy to combat AIDS. Yet, the levels of funding pledged in his speeches never materialize and the administration has allowed conservatives to meddle with the programs, channeling funding into ineffective abstinence campaigns. Concurrently, the Bush administration has diverted much-needed dollars away from domestic HIV research and AIDS outreach campaigns targeted at the population that remains most affected by AIDS in America--gay men.

In the '60s and '70s, as the youth revolution swept America and young homosexuals were radicalized, many progressive gay thinkers believed that a proper role was to submerge our own identity in service to the larger goals of revolutionary change. Concerns such as the Vietnam War and the black civil rights movement were the front-line issues that radicals believed would create sweeping change, making gay rights seem insignificant.

It appears gay people are back in that place once again.

Perhaps the best that gay voters can hope for is that they will benefit from the larger promises that a Kerry candidacy holds. Many of the gay men now being infected with HIV in the United States are poor black men without health insurance, and there is little doubt that a Kerry White House would be more likely to support health-care reforms that would bring them assistance.

Kerry is likely to effect change in the educational system, and, one hopes, a more educated society would be a more tolerant one. And the improvements in civil liberties that would result from an Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft-free Washington would be helpful to all groups interested in political change.

But we still face a choice. Do we blindly support the Democratic Party as it is, or do we demand more? At 5 percent of the national vote, the gay population should not have to pay the price of invisibility for participation. Few would argue that turning away from Kerry is a viable choice for gay voters in 2004, but perhaps it is time to end a tradition of presumptive support for Democratic candidates. We have every reason to demand that Kerry regularly and visibly court us in the same way that he reaches out to his other key constituencies.

There is at least one kind of assimilation that the gay community should reject: joining the majority of Americans who are disenfranchised from both major parties, uninspired by the candidates and being promised little in exchange for their vote.